Lets Get Lost

The day panned out ok. A walk, a swim and a digest of newspapers. The only person I had a conversation with was the carpenter regarding the new bookshelves. They are already bowing having only been up for a matter of days. Literally buckling under the weight of knowledge.

This evening I cooked a seafood spaghetti with garlic, chilli and parsley and lashings of olive oil. Whilst cooking and dining I was serenaded by Chet Baker on the sound system. It was all rather jolly or as jolly as Chet Baker can be as far as hopeless romantic, melancholic West Coast jazz goes, but it made for a fitting evening and he’s still got his horn in effect as I type. Forget your emo, this is the real deal.

I first happened on Baker whilst on a school trip to Budapest in the early 90’s when I found a bootleg CD in some dodgy record shop and I was instantly hooked. Certain albums have associations with a time, people and places but Lets get Lost – The Best of Chet Baker’ has been much more of a constant. Like a good a painting ‘where the eyes follow you around the room, Dud’, the music follows you through a lifetime, even in West Byfleet alone with a pasta supper.

In my first year at university everyone else had Cobain, I had Baker. It gave me an undeserved veneer of sophistication that belied my suburban roots in Worcester Park. It’s telling how now more than 15 years on of people I mix with then have that CD in their collection now. It became the daybreak lullaby after a night of clubbing to the Belgian techno of Laurent Garnier at Checkpoint Charlie.

Needless to say, in the age before the internet and where information on artists was virtually impossible to come by unless they were of the moment, one had to build one’s own portrait of the person/s behind the music and it was never like the reality. Bruce Weber made an 1987 biopic, also called ‘Lets Get Lost’ a year before Baker’s death, but there was never any chance of a rescreening of that at the Kingston Odeon in place of Jurassic Park.

Less a tortured soul and fast-living romantic, it turns out Chet Baker was one of the nastiest, meanest, smackhead bastards that ever had the horn. Reading the biography ‘Deep In a Dream’ some years ago was dark. ‘None more black’ as Nigel Tufnell of Spinal Tap would say. A lifetime of addiction, betrayal and beatings given and received. Everyone who trusted, befreinded or loved him ended up burned. In some cases dead.

He even used his girlfriends as unwitting drugs mules when passing through customs and on one or two occasions they got caught he abandoned them, distraught only at the seizure of his stash. All thoroughly disillusioning coming from the man who recorded ‘But Not for Me’.

So sometimes, it’s better not to have too much information in the information age. Maybe if I remove Deep a Dream from the bookshelves they will be healed. Such is the weight of knowledge.